Win-loss for competitive intelligence: Why every competitive intelligence program needs win-loss interviews.

Braydon Anderson:

Would like to welcome everyone onto the webinar today. We're excited to have you here with us. We're going to give everyone a few extra minutes to join us, so we'll plan to start in about three minutes. However, while we wait, you can enter into a sweepstakes for a chance to when some Clozd swag. Simply go to cloxd.com/webinarsurvey, take the brief survey about your win-loss efforts, and be entered in to a sweepstakes to win. And we'll plan to randomly select five winners.

So we'll give a couple more minutes and we'll plan to get started soon.

Awesome. Thanks to everyone that entered into the sweepstakes. We'll keep the survey open throughout the webinar for those of you who haven't had a chance to take it yet, but now let's get started with the webinar.

To start, we do have a few housekeeping items. First, this webinar is being recorded, and we'll plan to email the recording of it to you all afterward. And secondly, due to time constraints unfortunately, we won't have time for live Q&A, however, if you do have questions for the guests or for myself, please submit them through the chat box and we'll respond via email later on.

So let's get started. We're excited to talk about win-loss analysis, and specifically how win-loss interviews can be of value to competitive intelligence professionals, so we've invited three competitive intelligence practitioners to speak with you today. I'd like to introduce myself and our guests.

So first of all, I'm Braydon Anderson. Currently I oversee operations in marketing at Clozd, which is a provider of win-loss services and technology. Our first guest is Josh Parenteau, who is the director of market intelligence at Tableau, based in Seattle, Washington. We're also joined by Yvette Ross, who is over competitive intelligence at Zuora, based in San Mateo, California. And our third guest is Ben Scheerer, a group product marketing manager at VMware, based in Palo Alto, California. We're excited to have them here with us to share their insights on the benefits and best practices of win-loss analysis.

To begin, I'd like to briefly just set the stage and explain what win-loss analysis is. Simply put, win-loss analysis is the process of systematically tracking and analyzing the reasons of why you win and why you lose sales opportunities. Rigorous win-loss analysis helps companies validate their strengths and identify areas where they can improve in order to increase their sales win rates.

For B2B organizations that sell sophisticated solutions, a win-loss interview with the buyer is really the most effective method for learning why a deal was won or lost. Firms like Clozd specialize in these kinds of interviews. In most cases, these conversations with buyers last 20 to 30 minutes and drill into many areas, including the product or solution offering, the sales experience, pricing and packaging, the competitive landscape, etc. Clozd then delivers these insights back to our clients via innovation software, making it easy for users to consume and really share the findings across the organization.

The insights from these interviews enable organizations to fill pretty big gaps, specifically product gaps, refined pricing strategies, optimize sales messaging, track competitive market trends, fix sales execution problems, and more. In fact, according to one Gartner study, rigorous win-loss analysis can help organizations improve their win rates by as much as 50%.

So Clozd was founded in 2017 to bring a new perspective in technology to the win-loss space, and we've been fortunate to design and deliver win-loss programs for the three companies that are represented by our guests here today, VMware, Zuora, and Tableau. So without further ado, we'll jump into some questions with our guests about the benefits of win-loss analysis, specifically for competitive intelligence professionals, as well as hear their tips and suggestions for those who are looking to implement win-loss analysis for the first time.

So, we're not fortunate to speak with and hear from Josh Parenteau. So, with over 20 years of experience in the BI and analytics, Josh joined Tableau in June of 2016 to focus on competitive intelligence, and now leads Tableau's market intelligence efforts. Prior to coming to Tableau, Josh worked for three years as a research director and industry analyst covering the BI and analytics market for Gartner, where he played a key role in producing the Magic Quadrant and helped lead the transition to modern BI. So, we're very fortunate to have Josh speak with us today. He's got a lot of great experience, and we're really excited to hear from him. So Josh, thanks for being here.

Josh Parenteau:

Thanks for having me, Braydon.

Braydon Anderson:

So, let's dive into this. One of the questions I always love to get an understanding of is, first of all, just why did Tableau decide to do win-loss analysis and win-loss interviews?

Josh Parenteau:

Well, I think we were looking to augment some of the traditional analysis you would do with win-loss with really any company. So you have the standard metrics that you do, how often do you win, who do you win against, who do you see in deals, and even some analysis around why you win some of those deals. And you can capture that from your CRM system. You can capture that from discussions with reps. But what we found was it often painted an incomplete picture. There were always additional questions that you would have, and not really anywhere to get the answer. Your systems internally really just aren't designed to capture the level of depth that you often need.

So, we explored win-loss as a way to do that, so really getting that third party perspective and having an unbiased and just neutral person go out and talk with either customers of ours, in the case of a win, or prospects that we had lost a deal too, in the case of a loss, just knowing that we could learn so much from those conversations. So that was really it. It was just to round out what he had already started and built as a competitive intelligence function at that level.

Braydon Anderson:

Okay. That's great. Yeah, so I think this is common where a lot of competitive intelligence teams will be doing a lot of internal type of analysis. And so, I'm just curious, from your perspective, what value do win-loss interviews give you that you may not be able to get from internal analysis?

Josh Parenteau:

I think a fuller picture of some of the drivers behind both wins and losses. And in our case, when we win a deal, we don't require our reps to register why we won. So, we know that we won, we know who we competed against, but we don't know whether we won because of favorable pricing or product features or what have you. So we really don't know why we win, which is a blind spot.

In the case of losses, a lot of times, you won't get the full picture. So you could present a rep with 20 potential reasons why you lose a deal, and a lot of times they'll pick one or they'll pick pricing or they'll pick the first one in the list, is a pattern that you commonly see. So, just the incomplete evidence around why we lost was probably our biggest gap, and it doesn't create an accurate picture as to how you're performing in deals and what you need to improve on, or what you need to do over and over again. Like, what do you need to feed into sales enablement that leads to wins?

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah, that's really interesting. Yeah, you mentioned the sales team and how sales teams and sales reps, a lot of times they're self-preserving or, like you said on the losses, sometimes they just don't know. There's actually research that shows that sales reps are wrong about 60% of the time as to why they win or lose a deal. And so, if we're relying on a CRM field or even conversations with sales reps, it feels like that might not be giving us everything we need. Would you agree with that?

Josh Parenteau:

Absolutely. And it's not often malicious in terms of trying to hide something or not being transparent. Sometimes there's just a lack of clarity, in terms of how to record a deal based on a certain outcome, or there's fear in saying, "I don't know who I lost to. I don't know what the outcome was. They just went dark and I don't know how to record that." That happens a lot.

And we've seen that internally where there was a push to make sure that every deal got recorded with a competitor, so almost setting this mindset that just saying, "I don't know," or, "No competitor," isn't good enough. And that doesn't lead to the right outcome when it comes to analysis, because if you're analyzing your win metrics or your compete metrics and you are basing that on some incorrect assumptions or incorrect entries around who you're competing against, you're going to make some bad decisions, obviously. So it's the garbage in, garbage out sort of thing. Same thing applies with compete. Why do analysis if the data that's going into it isn't trusted and isn't correct?

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah, for sure. I like that. Could you elaborate a little bit on what you guys have done with some of the insights from the interviews and how you're applying them throughout the org?

Josh Parenteau:

Sure. And we've, from the beginning, made a very conscious effort to focus on both wins and losses. There's just a built-in bias or belief that competitive analysis is all about looking at why you lost. We've found value in both. So, starting with why we lost ... And again, these interviews have given us a really complete picture as to why we lost. So maybe pricing was a factor, but also maybe it was something related to performance or something related to ... Sometimes a sales execution issue happens, where something happened in the deal and it just led to a loss despite everything else that might've been positive.

So we've taken those things, and those are learnings that we feed back into either the product team ... So, if we see a consistent pattern where we're losing on a feature missing against a certain competitor or certain type of competitor, or performance, or things like support ... That's come up, where the support org has been made aware of issues that have actually led us either to churn or to just losing deals relative to competitors who had focused on things like support just in a better, maybe more modern way. So the loss side of it, I view as more of just corrective. Like, "What are the things that we need to elevate as issues that we need to fix across product, support, sales, what have you?"

The win side of it, I view as a direct path into sales enablement. Like, "What are the patterns that are leading to wins? What are the things that we're doing right that we need to promote?" And maybe there's a certain sweet spot or some sort of weakness in a competitor that we can identify and elevate through these interviews. That's happened where we've looked at a certain batch of competitors and we've found that they didn't offer one contract option, or they didn't offer something related to the product. We could take advantage of that. So just knowing that that is a vulnerability is a huge asset.

That's I guess the one thing I would really emphasize, is the wins are just as valuable, if not more valuable than the losses.

Braydon Anderson:

I love that. It gives you total like, "Here's why we're winning. Let's go and repeat that model." Now you have good themes and clarity as to why you're winning, and let's go and replicate that.

Josh Parenteau:

Absolutely.

Braydon Anderson:

So, you've talked about the sales team, and I think the question I have is, as you're building a program, how do you work with these other teams? Competitive intelligence doesn't always fall into the product team, and they don't fall into the sales team, but you're getting data that's supposed to help those. And so I'm curious, both from kicking a program off and then sharing the insights down the road, what have you done at Tableau to really involve these other teams and work with these other teams?

Josh Parenteau:

The way we started was, just to sell the value of doing more than just the basic competitive analysis I talked about earlier. So why do we need to do more? Why do we need to introduce something like win-loss into the program? So just talking about the benefits of that at a high level, and then we really started slow.

So when we first kicked this off, we basically did a pilot, and we were trying to gather insights from these interviews that we could share with senior leaders. We cast a pretty wide net. So I exposed some of the findings to our sales leaders, I exposed some to our product leaders, to our marketing leaders, just to say, "Look, there are things that we don't know, and really the only way to learn these things is through these types of interviews." So I was trying to build a ground swell of awareness and support to expand the program.

I think probably the biggest just challenge or caution is, from a sales perspective, I think when a rep hears, "Hey, we want to do win-loss analysis of one of your deals," it sounds threatening. Like, "We're going to go out and we're going to talk to your customer," particularly if it was a loss. If you lost a deal, you just don't want people to dig too deeply, a lot of the times.

So part of that is just building trust. The reason we're doing win-loss is not to throw anyone under the bus or punish anyone. It's not intended to be that. So I think selling the message of, "We want to improve our outcomes. We want to find out what you're doing right that's worked, and we want to find what we can improve on and make everyone better." So there is a huge element of trust, I think particularly with sales, when it comes to conducting these and sharing findings and those sorts of things.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah, that's so good. It's not a witch hunt on the sales team. You're collecting a lot of data and aggregating it. And yeah, sometimes there might be individual things that need to happen, but a lot of times it's, "How can we improve the entire sales experience? How can we improve the product offering?" Etc. So, I think conveying that is really valuable and important, early on, to make sure that they're going to feel entrusted, like you said, with the program.

Well, Josh, this has been really good. I've received a ton of good insights from this. I think the last question I would have for you, and I think we're all interested in, is what are some of the tips and best practices that you'd give to other competitive intelligence professionals?

Josh Parenteau:

Obviously, just selling the notion that win-loss is really something that is foundational to the program. I think a lot of people view it as maybe an optional piece of it or something that you may or may not have to do. Now that I've gone through it and have introduced it into the program, I'm not sure how you can be successful without it. So I do think just having that mentality and sharing that vision ...

I think part of getting support with this is doing what I talked about, starting slow, finding a set of deals that you can actually extract a theme from and some findings from. That's one of the things that we focused on with our first 10 that we did with Clozd, was, "Let's not just randomly pick 50 to submit and see what we get." We were very specific in terms of what we targeted. And what we ended up with was a set of some really clear findings that helped, actually in our case, validate some pretty significant business model changes that we were already in the midst of. So we used this as a way to validate our thinking, validate the direction we were planning on going in. We've also used it as a way just to figure out what our next step should be. So there's a couple of different ways you can use win-loss.

The big thing I think is just socializing and sharing the results. That's another thing that I think some compete teams have trouble with, is, "Great, so all this insight and all these findings that I've uncovered, what do I do with them?" I think just socializing across the key teams I talked about, product, marketing, sales, operations, and working it that way and just building exposure.

It's kind of interesting. So I actually recently presented on one of our marketing all-hands calls. We had all of our marketing folks in a presentation that we were doing just an update on. And I talked about win-loss and what we were doing with Clozd, and it sparked a bunch of interest. And I've had people from customer success reach out and say, "Hey, I heard you mention churn as a potential type of interview. How can we get in on that?" Or, "Can we launch a similar type of initiative?"

So that exposure, just when you start out from a compete perspective, does get other people thinking about other ways they can apply win-loss, even though it may or may not be specific to competitive intelligence. So it's a really good way for a competitive intelligence professional to add value and propagate their findings and insights across the company.

Braydon Anderson:

I love it. It's so funny. We see this all the time. There seems to be some hesitation, for some reason, to start this, and then people love it. They love the feedback. It becomes contagious and they just want more and more. It's so funny and interesting to see how that happens across a lot of organizations. And so, I think it's just, "Let's just get started. How do we just get a couple of interviews going, show the value, and really get these other people onboard that may be a little hesitant at first?"

Josh Parenteau:

That's right. Absolutely. That's what we found that's been really successful.

Braydon Anderson:

Awesome. Well Josh, really appreciate this. Lot of great insights. We appreciate you taking the time to share these insights with other professionals. So, we'll let you jump off the call, but again, thanks a lot.

Josh Parenteau:

Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for all the great work you guys do.

Braydon Anderson:

You bet. Thanks.

Josh Parenteau:

All right, thanks.

Braydon Anderson:

So our next guest is Ben Scheerer. Ben is a competitive marketing manager on the product marketing team for VMware's integrated systems business unit. Ben focuses on outbound activities, as well as research and analysis against VMware's most challenging competitors. Prior to Ben's eight years at VMware, he was in product marketing for Quest Software and CA Technologies. On the weekend, you're going to find Ben doing some downhill skiing, mountain biking, and fly fishing. So Ben, it's great to have you today. Thanks for joining us.

Ben Scheerer:

Hey, thanks for having me, Braydon. Happy to be here.

Braydon Anderson:

Awesome. Yeah, we're really excited to learn from you. I think you've got a lot of experience in the competitive intelligence space and in competitive marketing space, so we're really excited.

Ben Scheerer:

[crosstalk].

Braydon Anderson:

To kick it off, one of the main questions I've got for you, Ben, is just tell me a little bit more about VMware's competitive intelligence program and how win-loss interviews fit into that program.

Ben Scheerer:

Yeah. The way we have it set up at VMware is primarily by the different business units that are represented by products. And I have been associated with two of those, and in one, which was more around our Cloud management business, and into our integrated systems business. We've looked at obviously just growing competitive marketing or competitive intelligence function basically from the ground up, but also maturing as to how our field salesforce deals with competition on a day-to-day basis.

Part of that was looking at our win-loss program. I got some sage advice from one of my mentors when I first started, and I'm like, "Okay, what am I missing in building this program?" He's like, "Okay, well you definitely need to look at implementing some type of win-loss analysis research."

So I took that advice, and at the time I was just a one-man show and I was able to go out and find a vendor that was recommended to me and attack this. I learned a lot in this initial foray where we had to comb through our salesforce.com database, find these opportunities, be able to register the deals, go after them, and really hand-in-hand with a vendor to make that possible. A lot of work. We had a lot of challenges on the VMware side and our internal systems, but also being able to reach out to the salesforce. But all in all, I think it was pretty successful.

The first obstacles we met was basically timeliness. The way we approached it was just blind customer contact we felt would give us a really good, unique lens into the deal mechanics, but also it added extra time to actually go out and collect those opportunities. So, that was the first obstacle.

After that contract ended and some re-organization and we re-thought our approach, we decided to try this internally. So then I built an internal function. We actually hired staff that ran it and even hired some consultants to help us chase down deals. That was widely successful. In fact, we kept this just interviewing sales reps, both wins and losses. We were able to work directly hand-in-hand with our customer reference team, so that was very helpful for them. And we attacked that very swiftly and got some great results.

However, again, we only got one side of the story. So you often here in your salesforce, "Well, we never lose a deal." So we don't really get all the information on the loss. You can almost expect what that answer from a sales rep would be. A, we are too expensive, or B, this deal isn't over yet, or got combined into another deal, or so on and so forth.

Braydon Anderson:

So when you say you ran them internally, that means you were interviewing your sales team. Is that correct?

Ben Scheerer:

That is correct, yes. We did not do direct customer outreach.

Braydon Anderson:

Okay, gotcha.

Ben Scheerer:

Yeah. So then we decided to try it again externally, and this is where we looked at vendors again and decided to do a pilot program and just see how much traction we can get. We're probably still in this phase, but again, I think the value and the process is a bit more refined on my side, so I learned a lot walking into this. I think the value in targeting the customers and the information and the way we're actually able to consume that information is definitely looking promising.

And still have many of the challenges I mentioned before regarding our internal system, so it does take a little bit of legwork, so it's definitely a partnership and an effort. So probably one of the biggest lessons learned is that we are, I think, partnered up with a good firm to do this on the external side. However, it still takes quite a bit of effort internally to make sure we get the qualified candidates passed along and to get the information we want to glean out of this type of investment.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah. Making sure you're talking to the right people is a really valuable and necessary part of running a successful win-loss program, so makes sense that that might take a little more effort, but definitely worth the value. So, that's my next question, is what is the value that you're getting out of these win-loss interviews?

Ben Scheerer:

Yeah. Really it's looking at the trends. I just had a conversation earlier today with a colleague, and they're saying, "A lot of the stuff we get out of our analysis is maybe stuff we already know, just already talking to the sales teams and just getting deal information, maybe even assisting in opportunities and deals." Well, there's always those intangible benefits that you don't get as part of maybe just a regular interview. It's like those nuggets. Maybe there's a broken sales process, of no fault of maybe a salesperson. Maybe your sales team may have reorganized three times in the last two years, so the customer doesn't perceive a real value or real dedication by the company essentially valuing them. You get a new sales rep every time you call and they don't see the love, for example.

So those type of nuggets are extremely valuable to pass up to management. And like I said, it's the trends, why we win, why we lose, the statistically significant factors in your analysis. And being able to look at that over several interviews and see these trends, the value is back to sales, helping them refine their sales technique. Sales leadership finds that valuable. As well as back to the product teams. Is it really a product issue? Is it a pricing and packaging issue? Is it a technology, even go-to-market issue? So right back even to the product marketing side of the house. So it really covers many facets of the product and go-to-market and sales of the product itself.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah. And then I'm curious your perspective on this, Ben. Because competitive doesn't always fit into one of those teams, or maybe sometimes it fits into one of those three, but you have to provide potentially negative feedback to a different team. How do you best manage that? What's that look like for you?

Ben Scheerer:

Well, negative feedback, it can always be delivered positively. And this is approach we've taken ... I think with any technology vendor, you always lose on price. That seems to be the constant loss parameter. And is it really on price? Is it on value? So even though someone else's product may be cheaper or less expensive, it may be a value sell. "Oh, well you buy this product, you get another one for free," which may be the particular product you're competing against.

So delivering back to either a product team there's functionality that caused a customer not to purchase, or even it's too expensive. Being able to both help sales overcome those objectives and also, if there's actually a problem with the process or the technology itself, we can identify that. So then that goes back into, again, even sales enablement, is another facet that that reaches out to.

So you always spin, "Yes, this is a trend, but we did a new pricing and packaging promotion. We have new ways to present our product, and we have a whole value story that maybe needs to be refined, or we did refine it to meet these objectives." So it's like any product marketing role. You have your objection responses, and this definitely plays into that.

Braydon Anderson:

Sure. Yeah, and I think what we've seen with other orgs, and I imagine it's the same with you, but sometimes because it's a third party, when you use a third party anyway, that that can also help maybe lessen the feeling of negativity when you're working with these other teams. Because it's like, "Hey look, there's a third party that has not dog in the fight. They did the interviews. They found this information. Let's go ahead and make some changes based off of that." Rather than, "I'm on the product team and I found this problem about the sales team," etc., etc. So, I imagine that's also helpful for orgs that are using a third party.

Ben Scheerer:

Yeah. That's exactly right. I think any third party validation lends a lot of credibility, and we definitely leverage that internally as well. You're correct.

Braydon Anderson:

So I'm curious, Ben, we've talked a little bit about this, but I'm curious what are some of the biggest challenges that you face as you run a win-loss program? And how have you overcome some of those challenges?

Ben Scheerer:

Yeah. So, a lot of the challenges are still challenges. One of the things is obviously, and I'll say it upfront, is just persistence. So I think the challenge on my end, again, is getting good data. And we do get data, so let's not say we don't. Obviously we have a pretty decent system at my company and VMware, so we can leverage those. It's just going after the right people to give us the right contacts for the right deals.

So with a large multinational company that has several hundred products, and like I told you earlier, our competitive teams are basically housed in each different business unit, which represents only a subset of products, I could go after win-loss opportunity that might include several products and maybe not get what really interests me as being part of another view. They might get something for a different product. So, working with a vendor to help understand that, be able to really laser focus into what I'm looking for, and help interview and get the right interviewee opportunities is critical.

And I think I've learned a lot along the way on that, and passing over the correct leads in that respect. Like I said, it was a little more legwork, sometimes, than anticipated, but I tend to be very resourceful, so I look where others can help in that effort, and then provide the information and work really hand-in-hand with the vendor to make it successful for both of us.

Braydon Anderson:

Awesome. That's great. Well, Ben, this has been really good. I love the insights and the feedback you provided to us. I think the last question that I'd have for you is just, I think we'd all love to hear some of your tips or best practices that you'd give to other competitive intelligence individuals.

Ben Scheerer:

Yeah. When it comes to win-loss, I think this, for your own career, I think is a great endeavor to take on, because it situates you as a catalyst to information that, if your company's not getting it otherwise, makes a big difference. And it also gives you exposure up the management chain. So this type of information that we collect from our win-loss analysis literally goes right up to senior management, and giving them insights into information that they may not have otherwise. So for your own career growth, I think it's something definitely you should take advantage of, and of course it pays back again because it's value back to the business.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah. I have a quick follow-up question. So how does it get back up to senior management? I think that's a common question we have is, when we're getting these great insights, how do we get it back up to the leadership teams?

Ben Scheerer:

Well, at least in my case, I can go right into my senior leader of my BU and say, "Hey, give me 10 minutes on your staff agenda, or 30 minutes on your staff agenda to talk about win-loss data I've collected on your product." That'll get [crosstalk].

Braydon Anderson:

Gotcha. So it's just taking some initiative and [inaudible].

Ben Scheerer:

Yeah.

Braydon Anderson:

I like it. Yeah, any other tips or best practices that you might have for us, then?

Ben Scheerer:

No, just stay diligent. This type of program, you got to feed it. It's like fueling a fire. You got to consistently feed it, and greasing the skids keeps the engine moving. So once that engine moves, you got to continue to feed with opportunities, interview opportunity, deal opportunities, and then it's just like a sales funnel. It all starts to play and you get the results that you want to see and you start to see real momentum in the program. And that's kind of where we are right now with our last endeavor, which we started at the beginning of this year.

Braydon Anderson:

Gotcha. That's awesome. Well Ben, really appreciate the time today. I love the insights. This has been great for me, and I'm sure it's been great for all in attendance. So again, thank you for taking the time, and we'll let you jump.

Ben Scheerer:

Yeah. Happy to be here. Thank you.

Braydon Anderson:

Thanks, Ben. Bye.

Great. And our last guest today is Yvette Ross. So Yvette has over 20 years of cross-functional experience in marketing competitive intelligence, corporate strategy, and equity research. She currently heads the competitive intelligence function at Zuora, and previously managed competitive intelligence at Dell EMC and at Sage. She started her career in the investment management space, where she held equity research roles covering various industries, including software, medical devices, and small cap regional banks.

So Yvette, we're grateful to have you here with us today. Thanks for being here.

Yvette Ross:

Thanks for having me.

Braydon Anderson:

Of course. So Yvette, a common question we ask just to kick this off and set the stage a little bit is just to understand, tell us your story about why Zuora decided to do win-loss interviews.

Yvette Ross:

Yeah. It's a great question. So, we wanted to build and improve on the intel that we already had today. And obviously there's different ways to do that. There's different things that we do from a competitive intel perspective that helps us understand how we differentiate from our competitors. And I'd say before deciding to implement a formal win-loss program, we generally had a good understanding of why we lost and why we won, but it really wasn't enough in some cases. And I think there was a certain level that we wanted to get to in terms of truly understanding why we won or why we lost, and we wanted to dig a little bit deeper. We wanted to get that insight that you can only get when you talk directly to your customers. I think it's pretty challenging sometimes to get to that level of insight by any other means, so we felt moving towards a more formal win-loss interview process would definitely help get us to that level.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah, that's great. It's interesting you mentioned that you felt like you already had a pretty good grasp as to why you were winning and losing, and I think a lot of organizations feel that way, whether or not they actually do [inaudible] or not. But still, the level of depth and breadth that you were able to get as interviews have been happening, it's pretty awesome.

Yvette Ross:

Right.

Braydon Anderson:

So I guess originally, who was driving this initiative to start a win-loss program? Did this come from you? Was it a top-down initiative? And then how do you get stakeholders involved in the program [crosstalk]?

Yvette Ross:

Yeah. So when I came on board, it was something that they hadn't done formally yet. I think it was on the minds of different stakeholders, but it was just something that had never been implemented. It hadn't really been explored, as far as I know at least, to a certain level where we were ready to do anything about it. So I think there was definitely interest there. It was just the idea of, "Hey, when do we actually start this? How do we do it?" Were some of the unknowns and things that people necessarily didn't explore too much.

But from what I understood, I think there was lots of interest. It was just a matter of getting the stakeholders, like you said, to buy into the program. So to do that, I think there's different things that I learned along the way that really helps when you're trying to influence, when you're trying to persuade stakeholders to carry out something that they hadn't done before.

And I think the main thing, for me at least, was really just to communicate that value. What is the value that we're going to get that we don't have now? It's really letting the stakeholders know, "Hey, this is what the objective of win-loss is. It's really to win more business." So if you can drive home that message and de-emphasize, "Look, it's not about bringing on criticism or anything like that, but it's really about hearing firsthand from our customers why we win, why we lose." You want stakeholders to buy into the program by letting them know that.

And at the end of the day, it's really about communicating that value that, "This insight that we get is going to help us replicate some of the success that we've seen in the past. And it's also going to help us improve in other areas." So that was the way I approached trying to get buy-in with this.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah, that's great. And then I'm curious how it's evolved over time. Do you feel like buy-in has happened? Do you feel like more people are getting involved? And if so, how?

Yvette Ross:

Yeah, absolutely. So because this was a new program for us, we started small. So like I mentioned, we didn't utilize a third party before for this process, and so what happened was we got good insight from the first round of interviews. So we started with a small subset, we got some really good takeaways, couple good nuggets there, and that was enough for us to keep going with this process. And so when the insight started getting disseminated, I started getting different teams, even teams from different regions started to reach out to me to see if we could extend some of this win-loss work to their region or to areas where they wanted to dig deeper as well.

So I think the more of these that we do, and the more we share this insight with the broader org, what we've been seeing is we've been seeing the value that brings and teams are starting to get excited about it on how they can also leverage this in the different things that they're doing. It's been great.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah, that's cool. And outside of this call, you've shared with me just ways that people are just constantly asking now for more interviews to be done, and it becomes just contagious, it feels like. So I love to hear that.

Yvette Ross:

Yeah, it does become contagious. You start with a few nuggets, and then you start to add to those insights, and then over time you're starting to see valid trends. These aren't just gut feelings anymore. These are trends that we can actually validate because we're starting to build more of a trend series in terms of the insight that we're getting. So it's been awesome, because we've been able to say, "This is what we're hearing, and we're hearing it more and more and more." So it's been great.

Braydon Anderson:

That's awesome. So I'm curious, I know this was one of your first initiatives when you got to Zuora as part of the competitive intelligence was to do win-loss. Why was that the priority, or one of the priorities?

Yvette Ross:

Like I mentioned, we knew why we were winning. We knew why we were losing. We knew what we did really well. But I think just to understand it from the customer's point of view and remove that bias I think it was critical. It was another layer that we wanted to explore and build on some of the fantastic intel that we were already leveraging from our field. This was just another layer to get even more insight.

Braydon Anderson:

Cool. I love it. So as part of that, why use a third party?

Yvette Ross:

Yeah. So different reasons. I think for us, it was really to leverage the experience that a third party would bring to the table. So certainly, like I mentioned, we do conduct these interviews internally, which I think is a good thing to do. This is not a replacement. For anything that you do internally, I think you definitely want to supplement or complement what you already currently do internally. But there were many advantages of using a third party. I think the biggest one, like I mentioned, was just to remove that bias.

And what we've learned is that sometimes a customer might be reluctant to share something with us that they might feel more comfortable sharing with a third party, so that was just another lens that we wanted to include when we're looking at this holistic vision of where we win and where we lose.

Braydon Anderson:

I like it a lot. That's good. So, one of the things you had mentioned earlier was around, when you started the program, there were some fears that you may have had. And I think this ties into my last question, is what tips or best practices do you have for other competitive intelligence professionals? And how'd you overcome some of those early fears?

Yvette Ross:

Yeah. I think the biggest takeaway, if I were to summarize it in one sentence, it's really the worst thing you can do is just to not do anything. So if you're on the fence, just try it. Do what we did. Start with a pilot. Start with just a few interviews, if you have to. Build up from there. Once you get the insights back from that, I would highly recommend, then, that you sit down with relevant teams, focus in on what areas you want to double-click on for the next interview. And if you can do this, make those right tweaks, the insights you get will be better and better. But the key thing is you just have to start it. You just have to do it. And like I said, start small. And maybe it's just a focus of, "We're going to do 20 interviews and focus on all wins versus competitor X." So just to get even two great takeaways, I think that's worth it.

Braydon Anderson:

Yeah. It's going to constantly keep iterating. Start off with just one segment, and then build off of there, and keep getting better with these interviews and what you guys are trying to find out over at Zuora and whatnot. I love it. You're constantly iterating, but just start.

Yvette Ross:

Exactly.

Braydon Anderson:

Yvette, this has been awesome. Really a lot of great insights. Thanks for sharing your story with us today. I appreciate you taking the time. I know I got a lot out of these insights, so I hope everyone in the audience did, as well. So we'll let you jump, and really appreciate your time.

Yvette Ross:

Thanks again for having me. Appreciate it.

Braydon Anderson:

Yep. Have a good one. Bye.

Yvette Ross:

Thanks. Bye.

Braydon Anderson:

Would like to thank each of our guests for being willing to present with us today, and we thank each of you for coming. So if you have any questions, again, feel free to reach out to me. You can email your questions at braydon@clozd.com. And each of the questions that came into the chat bot, we'll follow up with those as well. So again, thanks for everyone joining today, and have a great day.

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